Another Productive Tuesday

You'll probably find this hard to believe -- we finally chose a light fixture for the low ceiling area. It's not exactly the style we had hoped for, but budgets dictated we lower our expectations. The fixture we chose reminds me of elementary school. Oh well. The woman from Cooper Lighting assures me she is using this same light fixture in an upscale hardware store in New England.

Drywall is up on one side of all the new walls and as soon as we receive sign-off on our first round of inspections, the balance of the drywall will be completed.

Duct work for the HVAC system was delivered today and should start going up soon. Our electrical contractor continues to plod along with conduit and receptacle box installations. By the way, we love our electrical contractor (Qualtec Electric) if anyone ever needs a referral.

Here are larger samples of two of the paint colors we have selected. Tomorrow the contractor will paint large patches for us to review in the actual store setting. We also selected the colors (French Gray and Almond) for the concrete pavers that will be used in the outdoor Patio Living Department.

The Manager of Retail Loss Prevention from Ace Hardware corporate HQ visited the store today. She is going to help us plot out the security camera system that we'll use to catch our employees stealing from us. Did you know that over half of retail loss is from employee theft???

Pam keeps working away on the merchandise selection. The actual orders for our Opening Stock Order (OSO in hardware lingo) are now being created by our Ace Project Manager. Pam is reviewing the orders as he completes them and regularly reports on how much money we're spending. "Now it's $40,000". Then an hour later, "Now it's $70,000" and so on.

Thanks for checking our progress - we hope you have a great holiday week.